Learning Gujarati in Yemen

In recent decades, Dawoodi Bohra Muslims based in South Asia have come to Yemen to visit a holy shrine. Many of them have stayed on, sharing their culture with local Bohras. In pictures.

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Syedna Hatim, the third dai, or spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect is buried at this shrine in Al Hutayb in the Haraz Mountains of Yemen. In the 16th century, part of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community migrated to India, while others stayed in Yemen.
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Dawoodi Bohras fall under the branch of Ismaili Shia Islam and speak a dialect of Gujarati laced with Arabic and Persian. Pictured, Gujarati script is printed at a stall near the shrine in Al Hutayb, Yemen.
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Hatem Zahir is among the ranks of Yemeni Bohras who have studied at academic institutions outside of Yemen. He speaks Arabic, English, Urdu and Gujarati.
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Pictured, Bohra children outside the prayer hall in Al Hutayb, where the third dai or spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community is buried.
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Although they wear the characteristic Bohra women dress called the ridah, Yemeni Bohra women continue to cover their faces, unlike South Asian Bohra women. Pictured, Yemeni Bohra women walked in the village of Al Hutayb.
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Yemenis have learned to make Indian dishes like chapati, or flatbread, dal and curries of Indian Bohra cuisine. Pictured, Bohra youth serve lunch at the communal feast in Al Hutayb.
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Murtaza Fakhruddin sits outside the prayer hall near the shrine of Syedna Hatim. Mr. Fakhruddin is from Mumbai, but married a Yemeni woman.
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Rashida Haji, right, walks in the village of Al Hutayb. A native of the Indian city of Pune, she has taught classes including yoga to Yemeni women.
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By Nafeesa Syeed

Nafeesa Syeed

Hindi script is printed at a stall near the shrine in Al Hutayb, Yemen. Click here to view related slideshow.

AL HUTAYB, Yemen—Seven-thousand feet up, a white mosque nests on the edge of a cliff in the Haraz Mountains, two hours from the capital of Sanaa, in northwest Yemen. Syedna Hatim, the third dai—or spiritual leader—of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect is said to have built this space where he ultimately died, eight hundred years ago. Devotees lowered his body to Al Hutayb, the village below, where he’s buried under a white-domed tomb.

In the 16th century, his community migrated to India, growing in numbers and into a wealthy and educated cohort. Meanwhile, some followers stayed on in the Yemeni hinterland. They became two distinct threads, separated by space and time. But the pull of Syedna Hatim is again weaving them together. More followers from South Asia have made their way to this holy spot in recent decades, creating a curious cultural continuum as privileged pilgrims from afar encounter their “backward” brothers. In the petri dish of this mountain peak, lines of language, dress and cuisine are blurred. Gujarati script squiggles adjacent to Arabic; topi skullcaps and turbans stand atop men’s heads; Yemeni saltah, a sizzling stew, is served alongside Desi dal; and face-veiled women give yoga a whirl. It’s a give-and-take in mounting a unified identity. For there is a way of being Bohra. And being Bohra, they say, transcends the passport in one’s pocket.

In 1976, Shaykh Shabbir Haji’s mother and father made their way to Al Hutayb by donkey. A Chennai native, Mr. Haji spent the past few decades as a professor in Karachi, Pakistan, at a Bohra institution. He came to Yemen two years back, drafted by the Bohra community’s headquarters in Mumbai to oversee operations at their center here in Haraz. By the time he arrived, a smooth road funneling cars into the village had since been constructed—by order of the current dai, Syedna Burhanuddin, whose photo hangs in Mr. Haji’s office.

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Syedna Hatim, the third dai, or spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim sect is buried at this shrine in Al Hutayb in the Haraz Mountains of Yemen.

Mr. Haji, clad in the gold-trimmed, white cap that is standard for Bohra men, was in a flurry on a recent Friday, as he catered to streams of constituents and answered phone calls. He slid effortlessly between Arabic, Urdu, English and Dawat ni zabaan—a strain of Gujarati particular to Bohras that is peppered with Arabic and Persian. He explained that they have other shrines in Yemen, but this is one of the most important. Some 10,000 Bohras, mostly from India but also from their populations in Pakistan, East Africa, the United States, Europe and the Middle East, travel here each year. Summertime is the high season. Though, Haji said there was a dip last year due to the “crisis” in Yemen, during revolutionary Arab Spring uprisings. That, along with ongoing security concerns of late haven’t made Yemen the exotic tourist destination is once was. But that hasn’t kept away the faithful.

“It’s a dream, once in your life to visit Yemen, to visit Syedna Hatim,” Mr. Haji said.

With a historical path reaching from Egypt to Yemen and finally to India, Dawoodi Bohras, as they came to be known, fall under the branch of Ismaili Shia Islam. For some, making the journey to Yemen now is a return to their roots. Unlike shrine-abundant South Asia, Iran or even Egypt, much of Yemen frowns upon making sacred the resting places of revered figures. Bohras, staying out of politics and focusing on their own community, have still managed to become accepted in these parts.

Syedna Hatim’s tomb is surrounded by a manicured green park and rectangular prayer hall, where men and women worship in parallel. From all corners, terraced fields cut against the mountainsides. After services, ladies strolled by in their ridah, the brightly colored skirt and head-covering ensemble worn by Bohra women. Cap-clad men in long white shirts and pants and flowing vests, special to Bohras but resembling a kurta pajama, greeted one another with a kiss on the hand. A readily visible minority everywhere else because of their distinguishable dress, Bohras get to be the majority here.

Community leaders say it’s in the past half-century that visits to Al Hutayb became more feasible, because of travel logistics and because of persecution of Bohras under long-ago Yemeni rulers. With that opening, came the glimpse into the state of Yemeni Bohras. “It was not developed,” Mr. Haji said of the area. There are 52 villages with some 3,000 to 4,000 Yemeni Bohras in Haraz, according to local leaders. In recent times, “upliftment” of the indigenous Bohras became a priority, and now Mr. Haji and his staff are also responsible for a network of social service programs that include educational, agricultural and infrastructure projects.

Like Mr. Haji, Abbas Quresh, a sturdy and no-nonsense man, came from Pakistan along with other outsider Bohras who are sent to Yemen for a few years’ stint to work at the center. “Our people here in Haraz are left behind,” Mr. Quresh said, citing locals’ socioeconomic challenges in one of the poorest countries in the Middle East. It’s in sharp contrast to the entrepreneurial Indian Bohra community, which some boast has a 100% literacy rate. “Our base is education,” Mr. Quresh said of the development efforts in Haraz.

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Bohra children outside the prayer hall in Al Hutayb, where the third dai or spiritual leader of the Dawoodi Bohra community is buried.

By education though, they don’t merely mean math and science. It further entails schooling on being a “proper Bohra.”

Among the dozens of young people who’ve been plucked from the Haraz villages to study at Bohra institutions abroad is the saint-namesake, Hatem Zahir. At 34, his ample amber beard bordering his boyish smile, Mr. Zahir remembers, as a child, the occasional visits of foreign Bohras, some stopping on their way to Hajj in Saudi Arabia. He was sent to Pakistan and in addition to his mother tongue of Arabic, he imbibed impeccable Urdu, English and Gujarati. His speech is laced with the idiosyncrasies of South Asian dialect, as he ticks off that there are “more than 20 lakh Bohras in the world” (20 lakh is equivalent to 2 million).

Yemenis try to learn Gujarati because their spiritual leader, “his holiness,” delivers lectures in that language, he said. Mr. Zahir now heads their local schools, where subjects range from Gujarati and English to classes on computers and the Quran.

Mr. Zahir, reliably in the gold-embroidered topi, said in the last decade-and-a-half, as social and economic projects have deepened here, there’s been a marked change among Yemeni Bohras. Along with becoming more educated, he said many Yemeni Bohras have kicked habits like chewing qat, the narcotic leaf that’s widely consumed in Yemen, as they consider it haram or forbidden.

He says Bohras the world over are connected first by religion, then by language and third by culture. In the last 15 years, “Yemeni Bohras came closer with their brothers in India and Pakistan,” Mr. Zahir said. In fact, now there’s a line between Yemeni Bohras and their countrymen, he said, while pointing to his well-groomed, white-hatted sons whom he addressed in Gujarati and Arabic. In his view, by dress and behavior, one can tell a Bohra apart from a non-Bohra Yemeni. “The people respect us more,” he said of other Yemenis. The Arab Bohras, from this rugged farming territory, also have instant access to a global network of this tight-knit community, when it comes to trade or other fields. “Before the circle was very small, now it’s very big,” Mr. Zahir said.

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Murtaza Fakhruddin sits outside the prayer hall near the shrine of Syedna Hatim. Fakhruddin is from Mumbai, but married a Yemeni woman.

The connections go even deeper with intermarriages. Murtaza Fakhruddin, who leads Bohra activities in India’s state of Rajasthan, is from Mumbai but married a Yemeni woman. He comes to Haraz at least once a year. “For us, this is a different universe,” Mr. Fakhruddin said. “I feel I am at home; I feel this is my second home.” The 36-year old said his kids, too, speak Hindi, Arabic, English and Gujarati. “They have the best of both worlds.” For him, it’s not about choosing one culture over another as at the core, the Bohra identity with its spelled-out principles—such as equality, he said—is the common denominator. “I am at this same plateau whether in India or Yemen,” said Mr. Fakhruddin, whose face, like many Bohra men, is accented with glasses. “There is a unique nationality called a Dawoodi Bohra, that surpasses every other nationality.”

It even comes down to what they eat. Yemeni Bohra women have picked up from Indian and Pakistani women the subcontinental Bohra culinary arts. Speaking in Arabic, Mr. Zahir’s wife, Sarah, attired in a canary-yellow ridah that she stitched herself, said she learned how to make trademark South Asian dishes: biryani (spiced rice usually served with meat,) tarkari vegetable curries, dal and the indispensable, wheat-flour chapati, a flat bread, in workshops offered at the center.

“It’s better than eating Yemeni food every day,” she said. It also helps because tourist officials here say the palette of South Asian visitors can only tolerate Yemeni food for so long during their trips. The prayer hall plays host to communal feasts following services, where youth carry massive metal trays stacked with round breads, chicken and gravy dishes. Rather than seeing this as foreign fare, it’s viewed as making up Bohra cuisine that is to be mastered along with the rest of the heritage. “We are one people,” she said.

And yet, there are subtle signs that the cultural crossover isn’t entirely complete. Though they worship and eat with their Desi counterparts, some Yemeni men don’t wear the Indian caps or clothing, instead opting for their traditional turban—often wrapped with a Kashmiri shawl—and white robe, blazer and jambiya, a gilded dagger carried in a waistband. Despite Yemeni Bohra women trading the black abaya cloak that most Yemeni women wear for the vibrant two-piece ridah, they still cover their faces, albeit not with niqabs but with hued headscarves.

Rashida Haji, Shaykh Shabbir’s wife, does not cover her face, a sign that she’s from other shores. Of the Yemeni women, Ms. Haji said: “Many a time, they have talked to me and they have told me that ‘we don’t mind coming out this way, but our husbands and men in the house, they wouldn’t allow us to ever come out without the face covered.”

Ms. Haji hails from the Indian city of Pune, in the state of Maharashtra. In gold-rimmed glasses, she was dressed in a beige ridah with a red-patterned border. She had long been an English teacher and school administrator in Karachi before joining her husband here a couple years ago. “I thought it would be very boring, and how would I pass my time? But the time flies and I don’t get bored at all,” she said.

She finds there’s a gap between women of the two countries. “There’s a lot of difference in the way that they’re not educated. They’re not allowed out of their houses at all,” Ms. Haji said of Yemeni women. “So because of that, what I feel is that thinking is very limited; they do not have a broader vision.”

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Rashida Haji, right, walks in the village of Al Hutayb in the Haraz Mountains of Yemen. The Pune native has taught classes to Yemeni women, including yoga.

Time flies as Ms. Haji, ever the earnest educator, looks to build that broader vision of which she speaks. In a room at the center, she’s given women lessons on everything from Indian cooking to Gujarati language. She’s even run a sports program during which she revived the yoga she’d learned in college and directed eager Yemeni women in the ancient stretching and breathing exercises.

“Now it’s high time that they come out of their shell. They have to come out of their shell and see what modern women are doing now,” Ms. Haji said of the Yemenis. “We don’t want to become modern as such that we wear Western clothes and do all the things that they’re doing. But at least they should have their own identity. They don’t have their own identity,” she adds. With girls now in school, Ms. Haji believes that educated women will have an impact on the next generation.

During her stay here, Ms. Haji has also learned a thing or two, including how to make some Yemeni dishes as well as speaking some Arabic. On some rare instances, she said she’s encountered Yemenis who might be apprehensive about strangers treading on their land or telling them what to do. But on the whole, she said people are welcoming. “We feel that we are all brethren,” she said.

After a heavy rain, the sun bowed down on the shrine. The hum of praiseful recitation coming from the prayer hall rose up, with Syedna Hatim’s mosque on the ledge above. Sitting on a red curb in the village center, Ms. Haji said she and her husband are unsure how much longer they will be stationed in Al Hutayb. She now wonders how she’ll adjust to being back in the big city. At this shrine, she said Bohras feel that whatever they pray for will be answered. In email exchanges, a former teaching colleague always tells her: “You’re sitting in heaven, what more can you ask?”

Nafeesa Syeed is a freelance writer based in Washington. You can follow her @NafeesaSyeed.

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